Another day, another unbelievable Wikidot application. Today, the Chatroom, a neat instant messaging application built entirely from Wikidot pages, magic, and five drops of Dave's Insanity Sauce. The creator of this work of art is James Kanjo, a black belt Wikidot expert who can smash a stack of bricks in half using only his bare hands, ListPages, and a few lines of JavaScript.

Presumably the Chatroom will join the growing family of reusable building blocks that we use to make social web applications. If you want to try it, head over to the active chatroom and say "hi"!

I'm sure there's some other site manager duties to take care of like setting autonumbering and maybe some permissions. Sorry I can't be more specific - I haven't tried to plug this into any of my sites yet.

Is this available for use on other wikis yet? When I went to http://chatroom.wikidot.com/ and looked at the pages listed i couldn't really see the coding to replicate on some of the pages. This might just be a user error on my part since I am not the most adept at wiki coding and such as of yet. I love the idea of it and would like to try and integrate it with my sites.

No, it is not yet available for other sites, at least not easily judging by some tests over the last couple of days. Hopefully James will do the documentation for this shortly. The application has only been live during this week and his focus has been on getting the application running properly (and a damn fine job he has made of it) rather than embedding it in other sites. But I guess it won't be too long.

How do I fix the redirect that sends that page to http://%%site_name%%.wdfiles.com/local--code/chat:_javascript/3

The %%site_name%% variable isn't getting converted for some reason. Do I need to hard code my site name in its place?
Nevermind, I get it now. The redirect was messing with my brain. It's behaving the way it should on the _template page (by showing the variable).

James, could I suggest a very slight modification to the color scheme you have used for the chat boxes. The black on dark gray background is something I find slightly difficult to read, particularly late at night after a day staring at a screen. The scheme could be lightened and brightened slightly by changing the CSS to the following:

This will create a nice separation between the username and the message and (depending on your screen of course) will look a bit brighter. It also softens the rather harsh 3px black border to a more subtle grey. The result would look like this:

Of course, these are only my suggestions, others may well have better alternatives to suggest.